More To Texas Than Cowboys

The home of her heart… After a decade away, Greer Bell is returning to Loveless County, hoping for a reconciliation with her family—one that includes their acceptance of her nine-year-old daughter, Shelby. Thanks to the local land-grant program, Greer's also the new owner of a dilapidated property she's turning into a guest ranch—and risking her financial future to do it. But she's risking far more than that with Noah Kelley, the man who wants to marry her despite the town's disapproval and all her efforts to discourage him. Shelby, however, doesn't think Noah is a risk. She wants him to be her dad…now she just has to convince her mother that sometimes kids know best!

So many books about the American West leave out the more intriguing details: When, in 1803, the young USA doubled its size with the purchase from France of an unexplored vastness called La Louisiane, it was a British bank which lent the Americans most of the $15 million that they didn't have. So the financial papers for the biggest real-estate deal in history are, to this day, held in a London vault. Not many people know that… If his ranching uncle-by-marriage had had his way, the teenaged Winston Churchill – a disappointing scholar – might have been sent west to Wyoming to train as a cowboy. Who knows but, in time, he himself might have become a rancher. How then would history have turned out? Another ranching Englishman played a key role in recruiting a small army of Texas gunmen to “invade” northern Wyoming and kill more than 40 small settlers, men who had too easily been accused of being rustlers. The plan went badly wrong. But the Englishman had slipped away – gone home on holiday… It seems unlikely that Butch Cassidy was killed in a Bolivian shoot-out. It seems that he returned, under a false name, to live out his days in the West. In 1935, he even submitted a autobiographical script to Hollywood – only to have it rejected as being “too preposterous to be believable”. He died two years later – penniless. “Royal tourist visits the Colonies” was the local headline. In her VC-10, the Queen had flown into the small town of Sheridan in Wyoming. First, she took an extended walkabout along Main Street and then she holidayed for several days on a friend's ranch in the shadow of the Big Horn Mountain … Tim Slessor, a one-time BBC producer, has filmed “out West” for nearly 50 years. In this book, he picks out a selection of fascinating stories that range from the mountain men and their fur trade to the pioneers of the overland trail, from Custer and the disaster at the Little Big Horn to the last stand of the Sioux at Wounded Knee, from the early cow-towns and the railroads to the cattle barons and the emigrant sod-busters.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE? Celia Remington is a single mom with a teenage daughter to keep safe—and the family ranch to protect. So she can't believe her luck when Brady Coleman answers her ad for a hired hand. He's lean, fit and obviously not afraid of hard work. But Brady's no ordinary cowboy. He's a special agent who's determined to uncover the source of the escalating threats to Celia's ranch. He blames himself for the recent ambush of his fellow agents, so this mission is top priority. But as his feelings for Celia grow, will he be able to find justice and still keep her safe?

The Beautiful Professional… After real-estate mogul Alan Barrett first laid eyes on Lisa Sanders, he couldn't keep the intriguing—and much younger—office manager from his mind. And when Lisa was tapped to assist him with a lucrative deal, the sparks between the two couldn't be denied. With a Shocking Secret But Lisa had a past she was desperate to keep from Alan. She knew if he discovered she wasn't the perfect professional she pretended to be, there could never be a future for them. And yet, how could she continue to keep her secrets when the evidence of her past was in plain view?

She'd sworn to never love another cowboy… Taking a teaching job in a desolate corner of Idaho was Kate Steele's way of making sure her in-laws didn't turn her son, Danny, into a shiftless broncobuster like his father. Except in the middle of nowhere she unexpectedly ran headlong into a genuine buckaroo…. Being a good parent and a born rancher were all that mattered to Ben Trueblood—until gutsy Kate Steele came along. Suddenly he found himself explaining to Danny that the rodeo circuit wasn't all that exciting…and considering the idea of hanging up his spurs.

TRUTH OF THE HEART Erin MacKenzie considers herself a candidate for the Dumped by Cowboys Hall of Fame. Especially since she was stood up by rodeo cowboy Abe Cockburn, the father of her baby daughter, Maeve. And then there's another cowboy—Erin's own father, rancher Kip Kay, whom she's never even met. Who's never acknowledged her. Erin makes a risky choice: she goes to Colorado to tell Abe about his daughter. And to tell Kip about his. She goes to Colorado to find the truth about cowboys…and about fathers.

"Novel Competition describes the literary and institutional effort to make the American novel matter after 1965. During this era, Hollywood movies, popular music, and other forms of mass-produced culture vied with novels for a specific kind of prestige - often figured as "importance" or "relevance" - that had mostly been attached to novels in previous decades. This trans-media competition, Brier argues, is a crucial but largely unacknowledged event in the literary and economic history of the American novel. In the face of it, the novel lost some of the symbolic specialness it formerly held. That loss, in turn, generated not just a much-discussed rhetoric of crisis but also a host of unexamined, intertwined effects on both literary form and the business of novel production. Drawing on a range of novels and on the archives of publishers, editors, agents, and authors, Novel Competition shows how fiction's declining position in a transformed "popular-prestige" economy reshaped the post-1965 American novel as art form, cultural institution, and commodity"--